Search Results for 'nuclear air in los angeles'
Collins to VA Questions 12-16-09
[Note that this version of Michael Collins’ questions for the VA includes redacted identifiers that were not in the original December 16, 2009 letter.]
Mr. Eric Gutierrez
Office of Public and Consumer Affairs
(310) 478-3711 Ext. XXXX
XXXX@va.gov
VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System
Hi Eric,
Thanks for calling yesterday offering to provide information, presumably relating to our recent coverage in the [...]
Grave Mistakes
Despite public outrage over soldiers’ tombstones disposed of in the VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical dump in Brentwood, focus turns to the VA’s $1 million Phase II testing for toxins. VA refuses to answer LA Weekly and EnviroReporter.com questions about its million dollar boondoggle as it cores for contamination away from the known dump, ignoring Phase I recommendations to test near upscale Barrington Avenue condominiums and exclusive Brentwood school despite high radiation readings in 2006.
Atomic Tombstones – Before and After
Erik J. Gutierrez, Stakeholder Relations Representative in the VA’s Office of External Affairs, sent LA Weekly and EnviroReporter.com this statement December 17, 2009:
A Statement from Ms. Donna Beiter R.N., M.S.N., Director of the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System:
The VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System (GLA) is currently conducting a surface and subsurface Environmental study [...]
Dereliction of Duty
A ghoulish graveyard of atomic tombstones, actually American military veterans’ headstones, were dumped in Brentwood’s toxic grave, according to a new LA Weekly article by Michael Collins. This online companion piece digs deeper into the biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on West Los Angeles VA land, land that stretches up under exclusive Brentwood School where headstones have also been found.
Atomic Tombstones Galleries
On January 9, 2008, EnviroReporter.com visited the biomedical nuclear and chemical dump at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Brentwood, an upscale neighborhood in west Los Angeles. We were there to see if the VA had finally begun Phase Two of its investigation and characterization of this site that we exposed in May 2006. This [...]
THE HILLS HAVE EYES – VC Reporter
Simi Valley residents unite to fight ‘hot’ KB Home development in Runkle Canyon
By Michael Collins
Ventura County Reporter – September 28, 2006
“I am not a tree hugger, an environmental activist, or an Erin Brockovich wannabe,” said Patricia Coryell before an August 21 meeting of the Simi Valley City Council. Coryell and about two dozen other concerned [...]
REAL HOT PROPERTY – LA CITYBEAT
A popular Brentwood dog park on Veterans Administration property is built over an old radioactive waste dump that may soon be unearthed by proposed development
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – May 25, 2006
SUVs and luxury sedans glide into the Barrington Dog Park just south of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood, where industry types and soccer moms [...]
WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED – LA CITYBEAT
Brentwood dump contains radioactive remains from decades of animal and human tests
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – May 25, 2006
During the 1950s and ’60s, both UCLA and the Veterans Administration were deeply engaged in the Atomic Age, doing their part for the Cold War by performing radiation experiments on a wide variety of animal and [...]
Darkness Over the Land
EnviroReporter.com experiences the tragedies and triumphs of California’s Inyo County and it’s timeless treasure, Death Valley National Park. This rowdy romp includes a cast of characters whose devotion to their earthly paradise is devilishly dangerous. Their sizzling tales shed light on the hopes and hazards of the hottest, lowest land in North America.
DARKNESS OVER THE LAND
A Love Story
By Michael Collins
EnviroReporter.com – November 18, 2009
The October moon rose over the Funeral Mountains and shed its ghostly light upon Darkness. She was perched on a sun burnt spit of land above the salt pan, a dark angel ready for flight. Her black wings cast a long shadow on the tortured earth below, [...]
There Lies the Fault
After extensive investigation, EnviroReporter.com may have discovered the source of Runkle Canyon’s heavy metal nightmare which has stalled KB Home’s development plans for over two years – Rocketdyne’s old polluted Empire State Atomic Development Authority site sits on top of Burro Flats Fault which transports toxins down into the canyon that the Radiation Rangers want tested.
Up in Smoke
The 6,400 fireworks at Santa Monica Pier’s 100th birthday celebration September 9 fail to ignite much excitement. The tepid pyrotechnics get lost in toxic smoke which descends on the city, gassing thousands of unsuspecting yuppies with perchlorate and heavy metals.
Double Vision
Fifty years after America’s worst nuclear meltdown 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s “Sodium Reactor Experiment,” the government’s just-sacked head of lab remediation says the new Rocketdyne cleanup law is too strict and that site owner Boeing is going to sue the State over the standards. New Miller-McCune article and exclusive interviews.
Corn on the Coca
The Coca complex was involved with several missile programs including Navaho, Atlas, J-2, Saturn V second Stage Battleship (five J-2s), Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), and Delta IV Expendable Launch Vehicle Tanks. Within the 141-acre Group 4, which Coca Area shares with Delta Area and the Propellant Load Facility, there are a number of chemicals that Boeing and NASA are responsible for remediating. They include volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including trichloroethylene or TCE, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), metals, and dioxins.
EnviroReporter.com Runkle Canyon Comments
When Runkle Canyon developer KB Home gave the Department of Toxic Substances Control 41 environmental reports on its property, EnviroReporter.com analyzed each one and presented its 28 pages of findings to DTSC in July 2008. The department ignored most of these analyses which we subsequently submitted to DTSC in February 2009 as public comments to the Runkle Canyon Response Plan. Will the department again ignore these questions and comments now that there is new leadership for the Runkle Canyon site?
ACME Runkle Canyon Comments
Aerospace Cancer Museum of Education’s founder and director Bill Bowling says that the Runkle Canyon cleanup plan is inadequate and doesn’t address toxic trichlorethylene being found on the property. Bowling calls out city of Simi Valley for not caring about issue and says that developer KB Home has a questionable environmental track record including building on land without removing unexploded bombs from a former bombing range.
Children of the Atomic Bomb
“This used to be marsh and reeds,” said Dr. James Yamazaki, 93, as we pass by Maltman Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard approaching Koreatown. “Now look at all these big buildings!” I was chauffering Yamazaki and his wife of 65 years, Aki, to the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles where he would speak about the human toll of nuclear warfare and the specific vulnerability of children to the effects of these weapons.
“THE VISION WE SHARE”
The Joan Trossman Bien/Miller-McCune Interview with Boeing – August 14, 2009
(Bien conducted this interview as part of our co-bylined August 24, 2009 Miller-McCune article “50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown – Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a [...]
NOT THE NORM
The Joan Trossman Bien/Miller-McCune Interview with the Department of Toxic Substances Control – July 13, 2009
(Bien conducted this interview as part of our co-bylined August 24, 2009 Miller-McCune article “50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown – Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the [...]
“MELTDOWNS AND HORRIBLE ACCIDENTS”
The Joan Trossman Bien/Miller-McCune Interview with Committee to Bridge the Gap – July 8, 2009
(Bien conducted this interview as part of our co-bylined August 24, 2009 Miller-McCune article “50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown – Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive [...]
THREE KEYS – THREE YEARS
“Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.”
(William Arthur Ward – 20th Century author)
When Denise Anne Duffield and I unveiled EnviroReporter.com in late May 2006, we had little idea of the effect that this website would have on the environmental issues we have reported on and continue to [...]
“Your journalistic practices”
“Dear Mr. Collins – without getting into the content of your story, I’d like to point out to you that your quote from Ms. Winger on our staff was so badly twisted out of context that it is utterly meaningless,” began the rant that we were about to read that confirmed to us what we have found wanting in the councilman’s office — competence and follow-through.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki Commemoration
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Area Disarmament Coalition held an event to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The event began with a service at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, which was followed by a “mindful walk” to City Hall.
Truckin’
Now why Boeing would mischaracterize the number of trucks that will be heading down into the San Fernando Valley with no assurance of the environmental protections that DTSC used at Sage Ranch? And why would Boeing not volunteer to have mandatory environmental protections during this massive operation?
Meltdown Denier
Who has the time to actually go to a source when you can just be it yourself? And, say, shorten an article to 2,900 words and pawn it off on the editor who’ll do anything to get a rise, even having provocateurs impersonating reporters impersonating supposed sources to posit a revisionist version of a seminal event in Southern California.
